Tag: Persephone books

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Persephone Books

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As well as Book Conference, my trip to Bristol a few weeks back included a day out in Bath, where I finally got a chance to go to Persephone’s Bookshop, which moved here from London a few yeas back and was basically everything I was hoping it would be.

As you may remember I got a Persephone subscription for Christmas a few years back, which yealded a fair few BotW picks, and I now have a fairly substantial collection of their books, but as with a lot of forgotten-type books, it can sometimes be hard to figure out which ones are going to be your thing from the blurbs, so it was a real joy to have so many of them in such close proximity to each other so you could have a read and sample to work it out.

And they’ve got a couple of comfy chairs for you to sit in to work it out and it all just looks so lovely and welcoming and the displays look so good. They have a multibuy going as well so if you buy in multiples of three you can save a little money. They also have a nice selection of Persephone related merch and items that you might like if you like the books and their design ethos.

And then there is this shelf of the fifty books that they wish that they had published, which includes a fair few that are on my shelves – like The Light Years from the Cazalet series, Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Jenkins’s The Tortoise and the Hare, Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.

I bought two books for me (which you’ve already seen), a third that was a gift and a little fabric pouch to put your book in to keep it nice in your bag – which is an improvement on the padded envelope that I had been previously using. All in all a great stop on a lovely day out.

Have a great long weekend if you have a bank holiday on Monday.

Book of the Week, Forgotten books, women's fiction

Book of the Week: A House in the Country

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I said on at the weekend that it’s sometimes been a struggle to finish something that’s not a reread and isn’t a later in series book that breaks a bunch of my rules do BotW posts. And this week was looking very like that, until I finished A House in the Country on Sunday evening.

A House in the Country is set in 1942, at the time of the fall of Tobruk. The titular house is a large, attractive country pile run by Cressida, a widow with an unhappy past. She is looking after it for its real owner who is away, and is supporting it by letting rooms. It’s filled with characters and types and shows the different ways that people are affected by wars. At times it’s comic, at times tragic. There is not a lot of Big Plot Action – although six bombs are dropped nearby one night they’re in the countryside and the war can feel a long way away from their every day lives – but it somehow manages to feel like everything is happening at the same time as well.

It was written in 1943, so at a time when no one knew which way the war was going to go and this gives it an underlying thrum of uncertainty that you don’t see in similar books set after the period. It’s like a little slice of some of my favourite things in the Cazalets – a dashing brother descends on his sister and wants advice on a love affair, young men picking the wrong women to propose to, older relatives not understanding the difficulties and shortages of war – but without the definite endings that strands of the Cazalets get. It will make you think and maybe break your heart a little bit, or a lot.

My copy was the second in my subscription picks from Persephone Books, and you can get it direct from them but you can get Persephone Books from good book shops too – like Foyles.

Happy Reading!